The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

Self-protection is learning how to take a pause between what you feel and how you react. When there is no awareness between what you perceive and the way that you respond, anything can control you. Practice the pause.

Decide what’s worth your energy, because what you engage with is what you empower.

You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it’s really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it’s okay to slow down. That you don’t always have to prove yourself. That you don’t need to fight forever, or constantly want more. That it’s okay for things to be just as they are. Little by little, you will begin to see that life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us.

destruction. It’s how you release your familiar unhappiness, how you decide you’ve outgrown the emotional crutches that have soothed you and distracted you and held you when you most needed it. How you move forward is what you begin to reach for in their place.

You tell life what you want, and life tells you how to get it. When you ask for soulmate love, you must listen if life says, but not with them. When you ask for prosperity, you must listen if life says, but not like this. When you ask for belonging, you must listen if life says, but not here. What feels on the surface like rejection is often redirection. When you ask for a big life, you cannot keep fighting for a smaller one to stay.

Move toward the people who expand your perimeter of possibility, who believe in your potential just a little bit more than your reality. Move toward the people who remind you of the person you know you’re meant to be, the ones who stretch your soul and make you feel something real. Move toward the people who remind you of what you contain, who help you fall a little more in love with life. Move toward the people who energize you more than they drain you. These little signs are not so little—they are the markers of our soulmates, in all the forms they come.

Finding yourself also requires losing who you once thought yourself to be. Cultivating the deepest and most lasting forms of inspiration often requires the most rote kind of consistency. Figuring out what’s right for you is acknowledging that different things are right at different times—alignment shifts as you do. Healing is often a process of being able to hold and embrace the contrasts of your experience, to embrace them, to let them be.

You will be more discerning about who and what you allow into your life, into your headspace. You will move forward with more mindfulness. You will begin to see that when your energy is leaking out into a thousand different directions, you cannot fully invest your own potential. You will begin to see that it was never about whether or not you were capable of becoming what you most desire, but that you were simply distracted, unknowingly surrounded by those who infused a sense of disbelief so deeply into your subconscious mind, self-limiting beliefs became the parameters in which you thought you had to experience this world. You will begin to decide what really matters to you, what you actually want to experience while you are alive, and gently, and lovingly, release the rest in time.